Production and detection of ultra-cold neutrons for the GRANIT spectrometer

Orateur : Soutenance de Thèse de Damien ROULIER

Neutrons can bounce upon a perfect horizontal mirror and become quantum objects at dozens of micrometers over its surface. The GRANIT spectrometer, located at the Laue-Langevin Institute (Grenoble, France) aims at studying the neutron quantum states in the Earth’s gravitational field. The energy of a neutron, that could be calculated the same as the one of a ball at a macroscopic scale, is then forced to take discrete values. The study of such quantum states can lead to the observation of deviations from the predictions of nowadays models. The production of ultracold neutrons, able to bounce on a mirror at any incidence angle, is essential for the spectrometer. The cryostat of the ultracold neutrons source has been improved, and the steps of the ultracold neutrons production in the source, as well as the extraction toward the spectrometer have been characterized by measurements and modeled with simulations. Moreover, a new type of position-sensitive detector of ultracold neutrons for the spectrometer is designed.

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